For D.C. Schools, Brown Wasn’t Enough

When Brown v. Board of Education, the 9-0 Warren Court ruling, came down 60 years ago, desegregating America’s public schools, this writer was a sophomore at Gonzaga in Washington, D.C. In the shadow of the Capitol, Gonzaga was deep inside the city. And hitchhiking to school every day, one could see the “for sale” signs marching block by block out to Montgomery County, Maryland. Democratic and liberal Washington was not resisting integration, just exercising its right to flee its blessings by getting out of town. The white flight to the Washington suburbs was on.

When this writer graduated in 1956, all-white high schools of 1954 like McKinley Tech, Roosevelt, Coolidge, and Anacostia had been desegregated, but were on their way to becoming all black. Across the South, there was “massive resistance” to Brown, marked by the “Dixie Manifesto” of 1956, Gov. Orval Faubus’ effort to keep black students out of Little Rock Central High in 1957, and the defiance of U.S. court orders to desegregate the universities of Mississippi and Alabama by Govs. Ross Barnett and George Wallace. While he has received little credit, it was Richard Nixon who desegregated Southern schools. When he took office, not one in 10 black children was going to school with whites in the Old Confederacy. When Nixon left, the figure was close to 70 percent.

For nearly half a century, no black child has been denied entry to his or her neighborhood school because of race. Ought we not then, with Stephan and Abigail Thernstrom in the Wall Street Journal, celebrate Brown “as a truly heartening American success story”?

Certainly, by striking down state laws segregating school children, Brown advanced the cause of freedom. But as for realizing the hopes of black parents, that their children’s educational progress would now proceed alongside that of their new white classmates, it is not so easy to celebrate. For despite half a century of desegregation, three in four black and Hispanic children are in schools that are largely black and Hispanic. And the old racial gap in test scores has never been closed.

A May story in the Washington Post reports that not only has there been no gain in U.S. high school test scores in reading and math—the USA has been steadily sinking in rank in international competition—the disparity between black and white students has deepened. The quadrennial test given in 2013 to 92,000 12th-graders by the National Assessment of Education Progress, the nation’s report card, found that the test scores of Latino students are today as far behind those of whites’ as in 1999. The gap between white and black high school seniors in reading and math has widened.

Speaking in Topeka on the anniversary of Brown, Michelle Obama bemoaned the fact that, “Today, by some measures, our schools are as segregated as they were back when Dr. King gave his final speech. Many districts have actually pared back on efforts to integrate their schools and many communities have become less diverse.” Ms. Obama is undeniably correct. Yet, there are other realities that folks need to stop denying.

First, as the Thernstroms write, where white children were 80 percent of public school students in 1970, today they are 50 percent and falling. In California and Texas, whites make up 27 and 31 percent respectively of the public school enrollment. If 74 percent of black kids and 80 percent of Hispanics are in minority-majority schools today, those numbers are inexorably going to rise, as white students become a new national minority. Second, there is no conclusive research that black kids learn more when sitting beside white kids, just as there is no evidence that Head Start has any positive enduring impact on pupil achievement. Third, after trillions dumped into education at all levels since the Great Society, with the educational gap persisting between whites and Asians and blacks and Hispanics, it is apparent the education industry has not only failed the nation. It has no idea how to close that gap. Fourth, while Michelle Obama may cherish diversity, the wealthy white liberals who dominate the D.C. metropolitan area appear to prefer living in predominately white neighborhoods and sending their children to predominantly white schools, be they public or private.

The 60 years since Brown in D.C. have demonstrated another truth. There is no correlation between dollars invested in education and student achievement in schools where the money is spent. Per capita expenditures for students in D.C.’s schools invariably rank among the nation’s highest, while the test scores those tax dollars produce invariably rank among the nation’s lowest.

And whom should be held accountable? Since D.C. got the right to vote, no GOP candidate has ever carried its electoral votes. Obama won the city with 93 percent in 2008. And since home rule half a century ago, we have had only black Democratic mayors and liberal Democratic city councils. This social debacle belongs to liberalism alone.

The New Jersey Supreme Court has declared the state’s finance system legally inadequate in various ways no less than nine times since the early 1970s, yet the state is still struggling to devise an equitable funding formula to meet the court mandates. Other states have similar histories of interminable litigation.http://www.rethinkingschools.org/restrict.asp?path=archive/18_01/just181.shtml

Excellent essay Pat. With that said there are certain points that you didn’t cover. First,the culture of education often does not exist in the modern “family” of today. In many modern families there is no father influence as there was back in the day when we were young. Not only for blacks and latino students but for many whites also. In many cases education doesn’t have the same cultural importance as it once did. Often,among the culture of minorities,to try and get a good education is to “act white” or to be an “Oreo cookie.” That is black on the outside and white on the inside. This was not the attitude of many minorities of 50 or 100 years ago who wanted an educational opportunity to work their way into the middle class. Next,the educational establishment of today is more about indoctrination then education. That is the modern public school is often used as a vehicle to “socialize” the students to make them more able to obey then to critically think for themselves. To put it bluntly the “average” student is being dumbed down to fit into the mold of a modern unthinking tax paying “citizen.” This is one of the reasons why many parents are sending their children to expensive private schools or,more importantly,home schooling them. Today there are millions of young people being home schooled. This is something that was almost unheard of 30 or 40 years ago. Finally,the “social debacle” as you call it doesn’t entirely belong at the feet of the “liberals.” More to the point,it should be put at the feet of something called “Cultural Marxism.” That is the planned takeover of the American culture,by the Left. With their “long march through Academia” the Left has been put into a position where they are able to control and influence not only what is taught in the universities but also in many of the Public School systems. Is it any wonder that the 10th plank to the Communist Manifesto calls for free public education for all. Again,the modern public school system,by and large,is not about graduating students who are self reliant,responsible,capable of critical thinking and able to think for themselves. Its all about graduating students who will conform and obey.

We’re missing the point here folks. What’s the key to how kids perform in schools? Spending per student? Quality of the teachers? Class size? None of the above. The key is the home environment. If you have a two parent home or even a single parent home where the parent tells the kid that homework first, TV/Facebook/XBox later, kids will do well despite a less than great school environment. But note that while the illegitimacy rate in DC in the early 60′s was 24 percent today it’s 78 percent. And we have a culture that if you are black and you study, your fellow black students accuse you of acting “white”.

Bill Cosby said the problem is not the schools, it’s not the teachers, it’s not the legacy of slavery, it’s a character problem. And to do that we’re going to have to change the hearts and minds of these kids. For Christians that means direct evangelical outreach. That means for churches in the area they are going to put facilities in Anacostia to reach directly to these kids after school that assists with things homework, gives them a safe place to hang out, but also tells them the message of the Risen Savior. McLean Bible Church, maybe the largest church in the region supports two outreach facilities. Collectively we as Christians simply need to do more. The time for political solutions is over. Only changing the hearts and minds of these kids NOW will make a difference.

As I normally rest on the same place (generally) on most issues. On issues of color, such as above, the historical data is overwhelmingly against a position that the educational model provided to black populations and reinforced was a weapon used to their deficit.

Probably wasn’t a good idea to deny certain populations employment, education, housing and equal justice under the law —

To applaud a system that spent centuries valuing one group over another on the essentials of society and then blame them for the consequences just does give credit to the ethical standing you have worked so hard to foster and maintain.

On this issue and it relation to color — I am hard pressed to support.

No ideas of how to close the achievement gap? Really? How about putting down the cell phone and iPad and picking up a book? Quit “hanging out” and start studying.

Yet, no. The two undeniable things necessary to learning is time and effort, two things contemporary students and parents agree should be concentrated in developing “social skills.” Besides, learning is hard work, too hard for these precious, unique snowflakes. And here is the cohort that bears the most responsibility: parents who refuse to require from their children the effort necessary to achieve.

America doesn’t need to become a nation of “Tiger Moms”, but it certainly needs to acknowledge without some kind of emphasis on hard work this country will continue to graduate Dumb and Dumber, if not make them Salutatorian and Valedictorian.

Winston,
Perhaps instead of throwing more money into an antiquated system we could use technology/virtual schools to move education into the future.Or at least the present day.Most schools run like it’s 1914 rather than 2014.
It’s not so much lack of funding, but lack of vision.Not to mention job-security issues which inhibit change.

Anyone who ignores differences between races are burying their heads in the sand. One race is not better than another. Each race has attributes for which they excel. And most importantly, individuals of each race can fall anywhere within a wide range of a normal curve for any and all attributes. So just because one is white does not mean that person could not be a good boxer. He or she may be way out on the tail of the normal distribution for that attribute and thus have more innate ability for boxing than 99% of all blacks. Add to this the fact that races are all mixed and you can see that judging individuals according to racial stereotypes is a grave error, and is the definition of prejudice. Recognizing that race is much more than skin deep however, is not.

The peculiar enjoyment many people take in dumping on their own public institutions has unfortunately led them to ignore basic facts, and even to assert the opposite as truth.

People must learn to disassociate in their minds two different things
1) Average test scores of kids today in relation to previous cohorts
2) Achievement gaps based on race, gender, or region

The truth is that in terms of their scores, today’s kids are the smartest since the NAEP starting testing in the early 70s. Black students today are smarter than every single generation of white students in the United States, except the current one. On the 4th grade NAEP of 2011, black students performed better at math than white students in 1990.
Commenters reaching for lazy stereotypes about failing public schools might wish to dwell on the fact that every single racial group in school today would have absolutely crushed your lazy-pants generation at math, and probably at other core subjects too.

Just a quick quip at dinnertime. The United Parcel Service has done a better job educating inner-city blacks than most urban school districts. At UPS, young black men learn responsibility, manners, the value of hard work and they are pretty well paid.

Frank Stain, it is true that at the lower grade levels, today’s blacks and hispanics have barely caught whites of 40 years ago. However, if we are considering 17 year olds (which we should when considering the ‘smartest generation’), you are simply wrong. After nearly 40 years of being able to ‘teach to the test’, and a decade in which the test was pretty high stakes, and learning how to exclude a good proportion of students, blacks and hispanics still don’t measure up to hippy generation white kids.

Even at the 13 year old level, whites in 1971 were well ahead of today’s blacks and hispanics in reading.

W ’71:: 261
B ’12::247
H ’12:: 249

in math

W ’71::274
B ’12::264
H ’12:: 271

Further, looking at percentiles, most of the gains appear to be at the bottom (i.e. we have a tighter distribution). That is consistent with more testing exclusion.

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Also relevant to this discussion is the comparatively recent drop in the proportion of white students in this country. I had assumed that this had been going on since the combined effect of the 1965 immigration law and Great Society welfare state helped boost numbers of blacks and (especially) hispanics. But this is not the case. The numbers only showed a slight decline in the proportion of whites from the early 1970s to the early 1990s , and indeed an increase from 1992 to 1994! However, after that whites plummet as a proportion–maybe due to the aging out of the echo-boomers, but probably the tripling of legal immigration in 1991 and the impact of the late 80s amnesty really drove this phenomenon.

I think Brown v Board of Education was wrong. It would have been far smarter to provide equalization of funding through federal funds for local schools than to force integration which did nothing but foster the flight to the suburbs, restricted zoning to segregate people by income and force integration mostly with those too poor to move and were left behind.

But that is looking back at history. For those living at that time…it may have been the best possible…people forget that at that time even non-african americans faced descrimination and prejduice.

Today though, the entire Public School system is disgusting haven for corruption and incompetence and government largess.

The entire Public School System needs to be destroyed along with the teachers union

School Choice and School Vouchers. All schools should have equal funding: Public, Parochial, charter and public.

By Law, the board of education should be restructed to setting standards and auditing compliance only. Basics such as music, athletics, math, science, technology, history, english literature should all be mandatory. Political curriculae such as sex ed, feminism, diversity, multiculturalism, etc should all be defunded and optional.

Between 1990/1992 and 2013, black 4th and 8th graders made bigger improvements in both math and reading than white kids did. This did not erase the score gap but did close it somewhat. Note that the average math score for black 4th graders is now higher than the average score for white 4th graders in 1990.

If you look at the state comparisons, (http://nationsreportcard.gov/reading_math_2013/#/state-gains) DC has improved dramatically since 1992 (in math) and 1998 (in reading). In fact, DC’s 4th and 8th graders improved in math more than any state. In reading, they showed more improvement than all but two states. Some of this is due to demographic change, but DC’s schools are still 3/4ths black. (And national black scores have risen, as mentioned above.)

Be angry, whine about it, but without a public school system in some manner the state os the nation would have far worse for everyone.

The constant whining about a system that is not going away anytime soon has made the conservative look rather foolish. The process of abandoning the system has not proven to be boosted the fortunes of the c country or the political or social ranks of conservatives.

The strategic wisdom of vouchers ha left the country in the hands of of liberal educators turning out out liberal voters and thinkers. The reason you have homosexuals suing and winning turning every biology course on its proverbial head is because conservative or traditional educators are some overwhelmed with shout down liberals of they have left education altogether. Having taught in education, it gets very difficult year after year to laud the founders looking at black faces. The problem with education in the DC area are the parents, the educators and the administrators.

So the answer is school vouchers. Well that won’t change the environment except in one meaningful way — class size in which students get more information and and attention. The voucher system is rife with the same social pitfalls if it were ever to become in the main. The costs of sending students to the schools of their choice is going to be substantial once several million, millions, and then ten million families start clamoring for them. I doubt that governmental support is sustainable and what’s more the private schools will soon face the same issues as the public school system, if they don’t decide to to close access to their system altogether. Funny on one ever talks about the millions more who will never be able to attend such programs despite vouchers and those numbers will still outnumber those who use them. Suppose 20% of the DC student population obtained vouchers. That leaves 80% still exposed to the dysfunctional system at issue.

Who cares what color the kids are if at the end of the day they are going to espouse an ethic that is socially burdensome on the US way of life.

Really? The answer is home schooling. So the DC parents who one assumes would be the beneficiaries would have to decide which parent should quit one if not both of the jobs currently sustaining the family to spend time learning the material to teach to the their kids. Financial security would come first just as it does today. Learn how to read or feed my kids and pay the rent. The time, effort, and support systems for home schooling to a population already under served by choice or circumstance of educational opportunities is unlikely to be grapple with the burdens of homes schooling. It’s a complex transition and most likely will yield little result.

These types of admonitions sound effective and they sound conservative, but given the end results hardly sound. Look, lots of kids. I don’t need a computer to learn how to read or learn that 1 plus 1 equals 2.

I just don’t buy the educational complaints that the problem is a lack of funds.

As for community, and this is why I experience some measure of guilt. When I hear a seminar on the drug war history one of the locations discussed was the DC area. And much to my dismay, what I learned is that the people of DC were very atuned to criminal behavior but for years and years the the DC police department engaged in a nonresponse to calls by citizens in black neighborhoods. Such behavior was so routine that entire neighborhoods were left to fend for themselves. Now if I am going to applaud the consequences of history such the declaration of independence explain how I am to respond to a public resource being utilized to serve one segment of the public. Helping to foster and survival of the fittest environment.

I have taught students from home schooling and vouchers. Fine students and generally fine people. I cannot be so encouraging about some of their parents, but that is another story.

Consider for a moment two contentions made: dec system if chock full of dysfunctional parents — we should advocate that DC students be reverted to home schooling programs.

If that is the kind of logic advanced to improve educational test scores is exactly why conservatives sound unhinged with an agenda wholly separate from educating students.

The problem with the DC school system is not their skin color. If that were the case then no black person would pass any school.

@Elite: I’m sorry but I’ll this again. The kids that perform the best are the kids that have parents that fully engaged. No, you can’t go play basketball until you do your homework. No you can’t do FB until you show me that all your assignments are done. Reading emails on FB is not the same as reading a book so kids who have parents who encourage “real” reading will inevitably do better than kids who think reading “texting” is an acceptable substitute. And white or black we change the culture to where it’s “okay” to actually study. Do that and kids will learn even in less than ideal schools. And keep in mind DC spends more per student than most European countries and most states don’t they? What are the parents getting for this money?

But what do any of us expect with an illegitimacy rate at 78%? So many studies linking illegitimacy with misbehavior, poor education performance you name it and this crosses racial and economic lines. And there simply isn’t a political solution for this. All of you suggest a viable political solution that is going to meaningfully address DC’s 78% illegitimacy rate. Go ahead.

No. For Christians I’m going to say it again, get out there and evangelize these kids NOW. Christians aren’t perfect but they tend to have less children out of wedlock, get less involved in gangs, get less involved in drugs. It means no matter where you are, the churches you are in are going to have to do evangelical outreach to these inner city communities. Billy Graham calls for spiritual awakening the theme of his final crusade, Lon Solomon senior pastor of McLean Bible Church in northern Virginia calls for revival but they can’t do it alone. The revival has to start today and it has to start with each and every one of you. That’s the only way this is going to change.

Well, there is actually an NEAP that is designed to track changes over long time periods. I’ve linked to it above.

And while blacks (and hispanics) have shown gains over time, they are still below white levels of 40 years ago at the 17 year old level and at the 13 year old level. That’s pretty much in accord with ‘race realism’.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Good, well-paying jobs with plenty of time off will do more to raise the standard of living and improve schools (and the tax base) than tearing down the public school system, breaking the teachers unions, pretending that everyone should go to college OR jumping on every touchie-feelie fad that comes along.

I’m sorry, libertarian jerry, but I really don’t know what world you are living in. I keep seeing news reports that kids have more homework and more textbooks than previous generations, at least at the lower grade levels. And I keep hearing teachers and teacher union reps arguing that they are the ones who are trying to instill critical thinking (which is all well and good, but teaching students some facts isn’t a bad idea, either) in their charges. As for the academic left, they may have some sway in the humanities, social sciences (generally excluding economics), social work and education, but given the large number of students going to college for business and finance degrees and the shrinking support for the humanities and social sciences, and the overall dominance of trustees and administrators through higher ed, I’d say that any Marxists who thought they were going to take over American culture through taking over higher ed made a very bad bet.

“The 60 years since Brown in D.C. have demonstrated another truth. There is no correlation between dollars invested in education and student achievement in schools where the money is spent.”

Really? Then why do all those elite white folks send their kids to costly private schools, or to public schools that spend lots of money? Money buys better physical plant, it buys more and better teachers and administrators, it buys more better books and equipment, it buys more and better computers, etc, etc. Frankly, I don’t understand how anyone can even make this comment. Of course money correlates, at least generally, with overall school performance.

“Per capita expenditures for students in D.C.’s schools invariably rank among the nation’s highest, while the test scores those tax dollars produce invariably rank among the nation’s lowest.”

This claim is tossed around all the time, but is very, very hard to prove. DC is not part of any State. Well, States provide a lot of aid to schools, which is not always “counted” in the school’s budget. DC schools get none of that. And some States actually pay, in the first instance,for certain things that, in other States, and in DC, are charged to the school’s budget. And now we have charter schools, which complicate matters further, to consider as well.

And, of course, COL is higher in the NE Atlantic Coast than in most areas of the country. Bread costs more in DC than it does in Texas, but that hardly means the bakeries in DC are doing something wrong. A cup of coffee costs more in a DC Starbucks than a Podunk Starbucks too.

Then too, one has to consider the student body. Again, DC is a unique situation. A single school district is the entire entity. And that district is composed mostly of poor, minority students, with lots and lots of special needs kids. What few white and middle and upper class students exist in DC mostly go to private schools. Perhaps it would make sense to compare DC to NYC or Chicago or LA or Detroit or Philly, but not to an entire State, which, inevitably, includes suburban as well as inner city districts, when it comes to costs and to student performance.

“And whom should be held accountable? Since D.C. got the right to vote, no GOP candidate has ever carried its electoral votes. Obama won the city with 93 percent in 2008. And since home rule half a century ago, we have had only black Democratic mayors and liberal Democratic city councils. This social debacle belongs to liberalism alone.”

Um, DC is run by the Federal government. Yes, there is a City charter and city government and budget and so on, but the city has no independent authority.

Essentially, a US House of Representatives committee runs the District. Everything and anything the DC government does, or wants to do, is subject to veto by Congress. In practice, DC can’t make decisions about taxes, budgets, its schools, charter schools, funding, etc, etc, because the House committee can, and does, routinely overrule it. And, last time I checked, it was the Republicans who controlled the House, and had done so most of the time for the last twenty years.